Between the Covers

Host Marianne Barisonek speaks with Code Pink activist Diane Wilson about her memoir Holy Roller: Growing Up In the Church of Knock Down, Drag Out: or How I Quit Loving a Blue-Eyed Jesus. For Diane Wilson, childhood was populated by devils and ghosts, holy and otherwise. Holy Roller: Growing Up in the Church of the Knock Down, Drag Out; Or, How I Quit Loving a Blue-Eyed Jesus describes Wilson’s Pentecostal upbringing in the tiny fishing town of Seadrift, Texas, where residents were ruled by poverty, labor, elaborate religious mores, and corrupt authorities. Despite that potentially oppressive litany, the book is a delight. Wilson’s world, at least to this reader, registers as exotic and bizarre, full of hysterical preachers and wild-eyed snake-handlers. It speeds along in a language of pure poetry, a rhythmic patois rich with the acute senses of childhood. And unlike most memoirs, Holy Roller has a murder-mystery subplot to goose the pace.